Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 2 of the very important and surprising lecture by Eli Siegel that we are serializing: Hamlet and Questions, of 1976. In it, Mr. Siegel speaks about the meaning of questions, and their rich presence in literature and life.

Principles Are There

The principles of Aesthetic Realism are true about questions. Those principles are true about how we question ourselves and others, and how we meet questions—and about the very existence of questions.

For example: the human ability to ask questions arises from what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the deepest purpose of a person: “to like the world through knowing it.” To form and ask a question is something that, of all creatures, only the human creature can do—for we have in us those tributes to and representatives of the world which are words. Certainly other animals are to be loved, admired, wondered at. And they too have a drive to find out things—like who may be approaching; where can food be gotten; where a valued item is. But they do not have that relating of oneself and the outside world with a certain abundant particularity and communicability that only words provide.

We come to another principle. While the ability to ask questions arises from our deepest and best desire—“to like the world through knowing it”—we also have an opposed desire, and it affects what we do as to questions. This competing desire is contempt—the getting “a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” Contempt, Aesthetic Realism shows, is the most hurtful thing in us, the source of every injustice and cruelty. And that includes an unjust, cruel, dishonest, sloppy use of questions. Very often questions have been used not to know, not to see truly, but to manage another, confuse, humiliate, intimidate another.

I’ve been describing a little how the principles of Aesthetic Realism are grandly about questions. And we come to this principle, in its might and kindness: “All beauty,” Eli Siegel explained, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” A question that has beauty—or goodness, or usefulness—is a oneness of opposites. It is good to the extent that it is clear, vivid—yet simultaneously has depth. A question that’s beautiful (though it may be defiled by persons’ repeating it insincerely) arises from the original asker’s desire to know accurately and also feel authentically. The asking of something rightly is at once personal and impersonal: it joins what the asker truly is and something representing the world outside of him or her.

There’s Hamlet

In the first three parts of this lecture, Mr. Siegel is using the opening scene of Hamlet to show what a question can be. We see that some of the most everyday questions of human life are there, and also questions that are seemingly much larger and more complex.

I’ll say more in our next issue about Eli Siegel’s great seeing of Hamlet, a work he wrote of and spoke of many times, and always freshly. Meanwhile, he refers swiftly here to his Hamlet Revisited. So I’ll point out that in it—in that critical masterpiece—he explains what no other critic saw: the central reason Hamlet could not avenge his father’s murder was that he “[did] not care for his father entirely.” Hamlet had objections, which he himself didn’t wholly understand, to how his father, the elder Hamlet, saw the world.

Questions We Long to Hear

It moves me very much to say that there are questions every person, without knowing it, longs to be asked; and they are asked at last in the study of Aesthetic Realism. One of these is a question asked of a person in the first Aesthetic Realism consultation he or she has. It was asked by Mr. Siegel in Aesthetic Realism lessons, and consultations are based on those lessons. This ever so kind question is: What do you have most against yourself?

People are against themselves in various ways, but usually the againstness takes the form of self-accusations, rather inexact, followed by self-justification, also inexact. Being against oneself can be present also as a messy nervousness, and a murky self-discomfort and self-disgust. That question What do you have most against yourself? is beautifully clear and thoughtful. It takes seriously the fact that we are critics of ourselves and hope to be accurate and proud critics. It tells us that what we have against ourselves is something to be known, and placed truly in reality. A person feels prouder the minute he or she hears it.

(I’ll add that of course for this question to mean all it can, it has to be asked by someone who has a real desire to know, and who has real knowledge of the human self—the knowledge that is in Aesthetic Realism. It has to be asked by someone who, when the question is answered, has the knowledge of where to go in terms of inquiry and understanding. I say this because Aesthetic Realism has been much pilfered from, over the years: persons in the “mental health” field have tried to lift and “adapt” some of its ideas instead of studying it respectfully. But the pilfering never works, because Aesthetic Realism’s understanding of self is a beautiful unity, and picking some phrases from it is like acting as though one understands physics because one can recite the phrase E=mc².)

As an example of questions asked—and the self understood—by Aesthetic Realism, I’ll quote briefly from a lesson I had as a child of 6½. It was taught by Mr. Siegel, and attended by my parents and me. I am looking at handwritten notes of that lesson, taken by Irene Reiss, my mother. Often my replies are not included there. But alive in those notes are the kindness and clarity of Mr. Siegel, so needed by humanity.

He spoke to me about two people I was angry with: my grandmother and my teacher, both of whom I felt were very ill-natured. Not only did Mr. Siegel ask me questions, he taught me what was the most important question I needed to ask myself about people. He said I needed to “ask how another person feels.” That is what people today need, terrifically, to ask!

In Irene Reiss’s notes there are these sentences, surprising and profound, with their questions. Mr. Siegel asked about a person I found so objectionable:

Do you think your grandmother feels lonely? Maybe when she is not nice to you she doesn’t feel so good herself. If she sometimes does the wrong thing, ask if she feels good.

And there was my teacher. I had said, “I don’t like it when the teacher yells.” And Mr. Siegel asked and said the following:

Why does the teacher yell? Life can mix anybody up, including teachers. Do you think sometimes your teacher thinks she can’t manage the children?…Do you think she ever cried in her life? Could she even think she made a mistake? Do you want her to be happy? She yells because she is unhappy.

For all time, I thank Mr. Siegel for his beautiful desire to know. He is the person who saw questions most truly, asked them greatly and lovingly, and came to the magnificent, longed for, and also delightful knowledge that is Aesthetic Realism.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

The Questions Continue

By Eli Siegel

So there are questions in the first scene of Hamlet. They change somewhat as the play continues. And how questions can have various hues or shades, it is well to talk of. —Bernardo and Marcellus, who are sentinels, have told Horatio they’ve seen the Ghost of Hamlet’s father. And as the first scene goes on, we have Horatio asking the following definite question, which gets in the other world and the meaning of the play:

This brings up the epistemological question How can you be sure of something? The idea of witnesses is here. If you saw a ghost and were alone, but then somebody suddenly visits and says, “Look! Something like a ghost is appearing in that corner there,” people might be readier to feel you knew what you were talking about.

That brings up the great philosophic question not yet answered: What is the relation of appearance to reality? As a person said, “Do you think my toothache was emotional?! Anyway, it felt bad.”

Bernardo is saying that Horatio has questioned the things he and Marcellus described to him. That is another aspect of the idea of question. People say things, and when you doubt them and are polite you say, “I question that.” If you’re impolite, you say, “I don’t believe a word of it.”

Then Shakespeare gets poetic. Before this in the play, he’s just being quite a good dramatist. But now there are the most poetic lines we’ve yet reached:

And just then: “Enter Ghost.”

No one has wholly explained why a ghost prefers to speak to someone quite literate rather than to someone else. Marcellus says, “Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.”

We Ask about Resemblances

Then we have another question. Bernardo asks about the Ghost: “Looks it not like the King?” That reminds me of some of the questions that would be asked about actors in the silent movies—maybe Ramon Novarro: Doesn’t he look like someone you know? Doesn’t he look a little like our cousin Joseph?

Then, again, we have some of the Shakespearean strong poetry:

It seems Horatio didn’t do so well, because the Ghost leaves after Horatio says that. “I charge thee, speak!”—Ghosts don’t like to hear that.

A Question May Be Unanswered

Never through the play is it wholly explained why the Ghost is offended. I guess a ghost has some feelings of its own, and it doesn’t have to explain. One reason, of course, for its displeasure is that the Ghost is expecting to see someone else. However, when you don’t explain something, often it’s dramatically very effective. To have an audience go out wondering can be very effective—as long as you feel that somewhere the dramatist knew what he was talking about.

That’s a question that is very large, but it is a question. And Bernardo continues, with a question often asked: He says, “What think you on’t?” What’s your idea of it? That’s why people have friends—to get their idea.

Meantime, Shakespeare, as I said in Hamlet Revisited, is building up the difference between Hamlet’s father and Hamlet himself. As far as I know Hamlet (and his career of course is fairly beginning), he wasn’t even thinking of smiting sledded Polacks on the ice.

The Question of Meaning

Then, as Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo speak, there’s the question of What does it mean? And the first answer given is that this occurrence is political. Horatio says:

He feels the Ghost is saying Denmark is in some danger, likely from another country. (In a while he’ll comment on the animosity between this King of Denmark and Fortinbras of Norway.) But he’s finding a political meaning.

Bernardo agrees, and we have him giving a sign that Hamlet’s father was not perfect in ethics:

As I said in Hamlet Revisited, if you’re going to praise a person for kindness, you don’t call him a “portentous figure” right away.

The Ghost reenters, and Horatio says:

That can be seen as rather impolite. Illusions, after all, don’t go around so much. But Horatio continues:

That is related to a very kind question: Can I do anything for you, bud? Or, Can I do anything for you, dear?

Some lines later there is the most telling questioning yet of the Ghost of Hamlet’s father. Horatio says:

Which means that money matters even in the other world. (Extorted, here, means ill-gotten.) As I said, this shows that people weren’t sure about Hamlet’s father.

That’s a stick of a kind.

The “vain blows” may go along with some kind of contempt for the Ghost—“malicious mockery.” But also, there can be “malicious mockery” from or in the being who’s present.

Bernardo says, “It was about to speak, when the cock crew.” That’s followed by a further questioning of the Ghost’s inward life: Horatio says, “And then it started, like a guilty thing / Upon a fearful summons.”

From Grand Poetry to Business

Shortly after, we have these great two lines of Horatio:

That’s the poetic highpoint of the play so far. —Then, after saying that, Horatio gets businesslike:

That last line asks the question Do you go along with my opinion? That’s a common question. And Marcellus says yes: “Let’s do’t, I pray.”

The first persons who saw this must have asked questions. By that time, 1600 or so, the idea of ghosts was rather familiar; but I imagine that the Ghost of Shakespeare was more effective than others, right from the beginning.